Introduction: On some occasions, patients admitted to Spanish public hospitals, do not have a specific physician responsible for them and this can have a negative impact on the quality of health care. The aim of this work is to measure the level of knowledge of the physician responsible for a hospitalised patient.
Material and methods: It is a transverse prospective study on the discharges from a public general hospital. Personal surveys were carried out on patients who were discharged and on their nurses, asking them separately the name of the responsible physician. The name of the responsible physician who appeared in the minimum basic data set (MBDS) was also recorded. The percentages of coincidence were obtained by comparing the responsible physician that the patient, the nurse and the MBDS identified with the physician who signed the discharge being taken as the reference value.
Results: The physician who signed the discharge report was identified by 26.5% of the patients, 48.8% of the nurses and 72.1% of the MBDS as the responsible physician.
Conclusions: The identification of the physician responsible for a in-patient by the patient, as well as the nurse is low and variable depending on the different medical services. In the future, the use of the physician responsible variable in the MBDS to obtain quality and efficiency indicators for each physician will improve the assignment of a physician to every in-patient, as well being recorded in the MBDS.